8-11-19 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Isaiah The vision of Isaiah, son of Amaz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jothan, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.

Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom.

Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah.

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices, says the Lord.

I have had not enough burnt offerings of rams and fat of fed beasts.

I do not delight in the blood of bulls or of lambs or of goats.

When you come to appear before me, you ask this from when you came to when you come to appear before me, who ask this from your hand?

Trample my courts no more.

Bringing offerings is futile.

Incense is an abomination to me.

New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation.

I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.

Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates.

They have become a burden to me.

I am weary of bearing them.

When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you, even though you make many prayers.

I will not listen, your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes.

Cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, and plead for the widow.

Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord.

Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow.

If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land.

But if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword.

For the war the mouth of the Lord has spoken, the word of the Lord.

We will read responsibly by the half verse Psalm fifty.

The Lord, the God of gods, has spoken.

Out of Zion, perfect in his beauty.

Our God will come and will not keep silence.

God calls the heavens and the earth from above.

Gather before me my loyal followers.

Let the heavens declare the righteousness of God's cause.

Hear, O my people, and I will speak.

O Israel, I will bear witness against you.

I do not accuse you because of your sacrifices.

Consider this well, you who forget God.

Whoever offers me the sacrifice of Thanksgiving honors me.

Indeed, by faith, our ancestors received approval.

By faith, we understood that the worlds were prepared by the Word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance, when he set out not knowing where he was going.

By faith, he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him in the same promise.

For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

By faith he received power of procreation, even though he was too old, and Sarah herself was barren, because he considered him faithful, who had promised.

Therefore, from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, as many as the stars of heaven, and as innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.

All of these died in faith without having received the promises.

But from a distance they saw and greeted them.

They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth.

For people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.

If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return.

But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.

Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God.

Indeed, he has prepared a city for them.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Jesus said to his disciples, Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Sell your possessions and give alms.

Make purses for yourself that do not wear out an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.

Be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.

Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes.

Truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.

If he comes during the middle of the night or near dawn and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.

But know this if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.

You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

The gospel of the Lord.

Almost any biblical scholar you read will tell you that much of what we're hearing today's gospel is sort of aimed at a fear of early Christians about how long it was taking Jesus to come back.

So this is called in academic language the delayed parousia.

And what it means is that the earliest Christians had the conviction that within their own lifetime Jesus was going to come back, having ascended to heaven, back to earth, and not take the whole earth to heaven, but change everything, right every wrong, and do it in their lifetime.

You can read this in Paul that there becomes this concern that some people are have died.

They've become Christian, they've followed the way of Jesus, and they've died and he hasn't come back.

And what happens to them?

And so there was this major, major concern.

What do we do while we're waiting for Jesus?

And how long is the way gonna be?

And when is God going to correct everything that's wrong with the world?

Now, interestingly enough, every generation or within every generation, as far as I know, there are threads of people who say, This is the generation.

Sometime in our lifetime, God's gonna do it, especially if the year ends with double zeros or three zeros.

Like around the year 1000, there was a mass movement in Europe that that was the year, and so people stopped planting their fields, uh, they stopped doing their normal activities, and then the year 1001 was a very sad year.

Um eventually this will be right, but I want to suggest to you that while that's the aim of the gospel, the way we've responded to it uh has been that, well, I don't think in aim of the gospel.

You see, there's a strong way to hear this that, hey, we're waiting for Jesus to write everything in the world, and so uh everything else is bad, and what we have to do, therefore, is to take care of ourselves.

Because when God shows up, if you're not ready, there will be trouble.

Specifically, God's making a list and checking it twice.

God already knows if you're naughty or nice, so you'd better be ready when Christmas comes because you're either getting coal on fire with sulfur and magnesium in hell, or you can get to go to heaven.

And that means the way you get ready, don't you see, is by doing acts of holy currency.

Holy currency in this definition is about being ready to appease an angry God.

Holy currency is about accruing jewels in your heavenly crown by praying all the time or singing hymns and really meaning it.

Or never feeling hatred towards your neighbor by being righteous in the sense that we are better than others.

If we really push it, holy currency goes like this.

You don't have to be faster than the bear that's chasing you.

You just have to be faster than the other guy.

And the way you outrun the person sitting next to you in the pew is by accumulating merit.

And if you get enough, then even though God doesn't really like you, God will still let you go to heaven.

This is so strongly in my own religious past that even though I'm saying it, I am still trying really hard to transition out of it.

I want to suggest to you, I think it has to be wrong because there's nothing gracious or loving about it.

Indeed, when we read the story, when the master shows up, he overturns cultural expectations.

He does not have the servants wait on him.

Instead, he nourishes the servants.

That would have been a very big surprise.

So I think I want us to reconsider holy currency.

Here I am in the middle, and once upon a time I went to a diocesan camp, and there was a mug that said stewardship, the work of the church.

Now, this is not stewardship season, that is three weeks away.

So the lectionary writers have put the story too early.

But I do want to suggest that I think this story really is, in fact, inviting us to consider stewardship and holy currency.

And it's important to say right off the bat that holy does not mean piety in the Bible.

Holy means extraordinary.

I think this story is asking us to consider what kind of investments we are making in God's family and whether we're making calculated cost-benefit ones, or whether we're making extraordinary ones.

There is a strong warning here to invest in things that neither moth nor rust can destroy.

If you read John's Book of Revelation, you indeed get a heavenly crown, and the first thing you do with it is throw it down, because nobody wears crowns in heaven.

So this whole idea, I want to suggest, where we've been vital into one-upping one another, because as long as we don't finish last, there might be some hope for us.

I want to suggest leads us to poor stewardship.

It leads us to a definition of righteousness that does not include justice.

And here, that's why we get Amos' reading, Isaiah's reading today.

Isaiah is writing to a people who were doing all the right liturgical actions in none compassionate or empathetic actions.

The biblical word righteousness doesn't mean that you pray five times a day and burn incense.

Righteousness in the Bible means justice.

Not the kind of justice where we get even, the kind of justice where we exalt valleys and lower high places so that the way of the Lord does not have to do this, so that God's family can be achieved here and now.

Holy currency is when we make investments in raising up low places in the world, in our congregation, in ourselves.

I want to talk to you about racing just a second and a way of racing that really, I think, embodies these differences.

See, when I was in high school, I grew up to be very competitive.

I was the second born, after all.

So I always just had to beat my brother, and usually I did.

Not athletically, though, so that was really hard.

I would always run these races, and it, you know, it's great to win, but second place is the first loser.

That was how I grew up.

That's this way of thinking.

And there's really nothing extraordinary about that kind of currency.

It's very normal.

My wife introduced me about three years ago into these, this is my new mental illness, to these like long distance races.

I mean ones that don't just take like 30 minutes but take hours.

My longest one took like seven.

And um, there was something really interesting about that because somehow it took me about 20 years to make this this change as a competitor.

The goal was no longer beating other people, it was just finishing the thing.

You know, I mean when I finished that seven-hour race, I won.

Let me tell you, I was like one of the last miniatures, but I did cross that finish line and I won.

And what was interesting was when I changed that to be the target, instead of beating other people to finishing, I I noticed that I treated my other racers really different.

In fact, during that seven-hour race, I must have I probably went overboard.

I tend to do this, I tend to go overboard in many things I do.

People would pass me running and I would say, keep it up! I would pass them on the sloop and I'd say, You only have one more to go.

I was excited that they only had one more to go.

I had three.

This must have been baffling.

On the way, I was nourished by one of our parishioners, Michael Conway.

I don't know if you know him, but but Michael, Phil and Sandy's son, he's an eight o'clocker, he runs these 50-mile, 100-mile ultra races.

And he told me really early on, he said, your problem, Mike, is you're running too fast.

His strategy, which is amazing, is he does these ultras and he goes to places like Colorado and Oregon, is to take the longest amount of time permitted and still do the race.

He says, Listen, I do this for vacation.

So if I run that race as fast as I can, I'm going to miss the scenery and I'm going to miss the people and I'm going to hurt my body.

He just did one in Silverton, Colorado.

It took him 21 hours.

I think he could have done it in 15.

Michael told me that he purposefully goes to the back, encourages other people, has made wonderful friends from all over the country doing this, and he rarely gets hurt.

It's as if Michael believes that God is chasing us to gather us up.

Think how different that is from God the bear seeking to devour us.

God is chasing us to scoop us up.

And the way we run either helps other people enjoy the way or reinforces a fear of God.

And so holy currency, I want to suggest to you, is not about accruing merit, it's about making investments in God's infrastructure.

We hear today, right?

God is building a city.

We hear that by faith, by faith, people, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc., used holy currency.

That is, they made ostensibly invisible investments that in fact had visible realities.

If the author had continued writing, I'm suspicious, the author of Hebrews might have said, by faith, the saints of St.

Thomas bought 160 backpacks and stacked them with school supplies so that children didn't have to pick between readiness and food.

By faith.

By faith, the people of St.

Thomas gave an incredible amount of time and energy and money to Hurricane Harvey relief.

By faith, the people of St.

Thomas used holy currency, invested even literal dollars in making the city God has in mind right now.

If we go here, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and that's great.

Let's try to get out of it as soon as we can.

If we will hold on to this idea that there's holy currency now, that God would build a city on earth, then don't you see we have the invitation to live in the city God intends and not have to wait.

We do this when we choose to make investments, like choosing to enjoy the race, choosing to bring others along with us instead of passing them or tripping them or pushing them down.

Those investments cannot rot.

They cannot be eaten by moth or worm.

They're heavenly values that amount to these sorts of things you might have heard in ordinary words, like integrity is what you do when nobody's looking, or your reputation is the one thing nobody can take from you, you have to give it up.

These are the sorts of things what do we invest in.

The servants, don't you see, are awake looking for the Lord, not waiting for the Lord to come in through some locked door.

No, the servants are looking for the Lord in every person that they meet.

And the Lord will be glad and will nourish them.

The Lord will wait on them.

Don't think that the Lord will nourish you and wait on you hand and foot so you never have to do anything.

No, no, we say this every week.

We don't come here for solace only.

We come for strength, we come for renewal so that we can continue to invest holy currency.

And I do hope you heard me read the gospel and add a little word in there.

You see, we often hear God will do this for you and you.

And what we don't always realize is the you is in second person plural, not first.

God will do this for y'all.

How many of y'all?

All y'all.

And so imagine if we were able to just glimpse, and even if we didn't see it, we pretended we did.

That's called faith.

We pretended we could see the Lord in all y'all, it might change the values we live into.

You see, the scripture says, wherever your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

And in the Bible, the word heart means the center of your will.

The center of your will.

If our treasure is in scarce resources, being afraid of God, edging out other people, I'm positive that will influence our will.

We will interact with the world like that.

And listen, that isn't much of a treasure, is it?

That's actually kind of well a bear trap.

On the other hand, if our treasure is in finishing together, like with all y'all, even if we have to carry folks sometimes before they can go again, if our treasure is being present in the way, enjoying the beautiful scenery as we race, being in ourselves, making holy currency investments, then it might just filter through to the way we act.

And don't you see?

That's the city God bids us come and build.